Of Mike Ilitch, softball — and business

I've taught journalism. How, kids ask, do you get into business reporting?

How they will get into it, I have no idea.

I know how I got into it, and it's not replicable, not something I can pass advice on: I morphed into a business reporter because Mike Ilitch and I both loved softball.

People associate Mike with the Tigers and the Red Wings, of course. What most have forgotten or never knew is that the first professional sports team he owned was the Detroit Caesars, a professional softball team from 1977 to1979.

Ilitch was an athlete, himself, good enough to play minor league baseball for three years in the Detroit Tigers' organization in the 1950s.

In the '50s, Detroit was a hotbed for fast-pitch softball. By 1970, slow-pitch was all the rage, with communities throughout the metropolitan area building softball complexes.

That year, the Little Caesars Pizza tournament softball team that Ilitch sponsored won the Amateur Softball Association's national title.

In 1977, Bill Byrne, a former executive with the short-lived World Football League, founded the American Professional Slow-Pitch Softball League, which included teams in Philadelphia, Louisville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Baltimore and Detroit.

Ilitch owned the Detroit franchise, called the Caesars, and it included half of his former amateur team and softball stars recruited from around the country. (To the surprise of some of them, the contract they signed was a personal-services contract; not only did they play softball, they were required on occasion to sit near busy intersections and count cars in scouting for possible future Little Caesars locations).

The league would have lasted longer than three years if teams in other cities drew the crowds the Caesars drew to Memorial Field in what was then known as East Detroit. Upwards of 10,000 would pack the bleachers and line the chain-link fence that surrounded the playing field.

The first two years, the Caesars were the best team in the league, winning the playoffs both times.

Despite the crowds, despite the championships, and even though Ilitch signed former Tigers Jim Northrup and Norm Cash to the team to try to drum up some publicity, no one in the media paid much attention.

Except me.

I was a sports writer for the Free Press at the time and a softball nut, myself. I played left field on the Free Press team, played in four Detroit leagues on the weekends and on a St. Clair Shores team during the week.

In those days, the Free Press sports department had just gotten computer terminals, but there were no such things as laptops or even PCs for home use. When a sports reporter's team ended its season, he or she was assigned rewrite duties in the office. You turned wire service briefs into something more lively, wrote up short accounts of pro games in other cities as they ended and played a lot of liar's poker, waiting for the magic words from whoever was boss that day, usually about 11 p.m., that it was OK to leave.

Which meant it was OK to race to the Anchor Bar for a beer or two. Or three.

Nights were pretty boring, and the office was almost always overstaffed. Working remotely hadn't yet been invented.

When Ilitch formed the Caesars, I volunteered to cover the games, and to my surprise, my bosses went along.

Ilitch was thrilled that if only one media outlet in town paid any attention, it was the Freep, a statewide paper at the historical peak of its circulation.

Fast forward to 1982, when Ilitch bought the long-struggling Red Wings for $8 million. I had quit the Free Press in 1979 after a painful divorce (are there any other kinds?) and decided to spend as much of my time and money as possible in the Anchor Bar.

By the time Ilitch bought the Wings, I was out of money and embarking, slowly, on what I hoped would be a freelance career. I was picking up a fair amount of work from the Free Press sports department when the phone rang a few days after Ilitch had bought the team/

The caller was the editor of the Freep's business section. He wanted to do a profile of Ilitch, who then, and later, wasn't much interested in talking to reporters. Ilitch hadn't returned any calls, said the editor, who told me he'd been checking the clips on Ilitch — in those predigital days, stories were cut out of the paper and placed in envelopes in the paper's library; it you wanted to see what stories had been written about Ilitch over the years, you went to the library and went to the filing cabinet with an "I" on it — and saw I'd written a bunch of stories on Ilitch's softball team. Did I think he'd return my calls?

I did.

I called Little Caesars headquarters, then out in Farmington Hills, and he called me back a few minutes later. The next day we were having a burger and beer at a bar just around the corner from the first Little Caesars he and Marian had opened in Garden City in 1959.

I shocked Ilitch when the bill came and as he reached out to take it, I beat him to the punch.

"The Knights are richer than you. Let them pay for it," I said, referring to the brothers who owned the Free Press and other dailies around the country. (Years later, he'd joke with me about what a shock it was for a reporter to pick up a tab.)

A few days later, a lengthy profile of the new Wings owner ran on the front page of the business section.

"For a sports writer, that was pretty good," said the business editor, thinking he was paying me a compliment. Most of the folks at the paper looked down their noses, condescendingly, at the sports department, which was always a mystery to us. We worked on the toughest deadlines and wrote the best, most colorful copy in the paper.

The editor asked me if I was interested in doing more business profiles. I was. Suddenly I was a business reporter.

One thing I had to keep out of the Ilitch profile was the answer he gave me to this question:

"Why in the world would you want to buy this mess of a team?"

I'd covered the Red Wings from 1974-1979 and except for one good year when the team finally made the playoffs under General Manager Ted Lindsay, the franchise was just horrible, and they routinely drew noncrowds of 2,000 into the fabled Olympia.

The price was right, he said.

The real reason, though, he told me, was off the record.

"This is just practice for when I buy the Tigers."

The Tigers? I asked, taken aback.

Yep, he said. John Fetzer, then the aging owner of the Tigers, had promised him he would sell the team to him when it came time to sell.

Alas, that didn't come to pass. To Ilitch's shock and dismay, the very next year, Fetzer sold the Tigers to someone else. And not just anyone else, but to Tom Monaghan, owner of Domino's Pizza, Little Caesars' archrival.

Eventually, of course, Ilitch would get the Tigers.

In the meantime, he had a lot of work to do to get the Wings back to respectability. That first year, he gave a new car away to some fan every game, trying to get bodies into seats.

The swaths of empty seats worked out for the Anchor Bar, which did a big charity fund-raiser every fall to buy Christmas gifts for poor kids.

For several years, Ilitch would give me 30-40 tickets free of charge for the Anchor Bar to sell. The bar sold them for well above face value and every penny went to buy toys. Ilitch never asked for a receipt or an accounting. I think he figured if you can't trust a reporter who picks up a bar tab, who can you trust?

I spent most of the 1990s as senior editor of a monthly called Corporate Detroit Magazine. I tried not to go to the well too often, but when I needed him for a story, Ilitch returned my calls.

I was a staff reporter at Crain's from 2005 through this past December, and continue to freelance for the publication, still on the path Ilitch put me on.